The Bluegrass and Beyond

I had been meaning for some time to check out the Southland Jamboree, a free bluegrass music show each Tuesday evening during the summer on the lawn beside Collins Bowling Centers-Southland.

I arrived after this week’s show had started, and more than 200 people were there. A great band was on stage, each man dressed in perfect Bill Monroe style: dark suit, tie and white cowboy hat.

It was a classic Kentucky scene until the music stopped and the band leader started speaking — with an Australian accent.

It turns out the band, Bluegrass Parkway, hails from Perth, Australia. Southland Jamboree was a warm-up gig for this weekend’s 35th annual Festival of the Bluegrass at the Kentucky Horse Park campground.

Band leader Paul Duff said afterward that he wasn’t a musician until he was 18 and walked into a northern Australian pub where a bluegrass band was playing. “I walked out and said, ‘I’ve got to play it,’” he said.

Duff learned to play the mandolin, then learned how to make one. He first came to Kentucky to work and study in the early 1980s, then returned to live in Lexington for a time in the early 1990s. He went back to Australia with a Lexington-born wife, Maria Ketron, and a mission to spread bluegrass music.

“It’s real music …. It has got that universality,” he said, explaining that bluegrass is increasingly popular around the world, especially in Australia and Europe. “I love the sociology of bluegrass music. The sound is great, and the lyrics are about hard times and people sticking together.”

The Festival of the Bluegrass this weekend will include fans from across the globe. Find the performance schedule and other information at www.festivalofthebluegrass.com. And if you doubt bluegrass music’s international appeal, check out the Web site’s online guest map.

Also worth seeing, doing

Visitors also will be coming to Kentucky this weekend for Cycle the Gorge rally and family fun ride Saturday and Sunday at Stanton. It’s a prelude to a summer of racing events at the Red River Gorge that will attract cyclists from around the country.

It’s not too late to register for the rally and family run ride. Go to www.tour-rrg.com.

For a less strenuous tour of Kentucky’s natural beauty, consider booking one of the Suburban Women’s Club’s behind-the-fences tours of local horse farms. This year’s tour dates are June 19, July 17, Aug. 21 and Oct. 16.

The five-hour bus tour visits Chesapeake and Woods Edge farms, with lunch at Chrisman Mill Winery. The tour costs $50, with profits going to the club’s charitable works, which include college scholarships and Operation Read.

The Suburban Women’s Club, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary, has been doing these tours for 36 years. For more information, call (859) 624-2338.

If you like contemporary art, Breathitt County artist and former corporate lawyer Theo Edmonds, whom I wrote about in April, is back in Lexington. He has rented space at 351 West Short Street for a free gallery show 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. every day through June 19.

The show features some terrific work he created during six months in New York. Edmonds has set up a studio in the back of the gallery space, where he is working and eager to talk.

If you like less-contemporary art, you have three more days to see Excavating Egypt, the fascinating show of antiquities at The Art Museum at University of Kentucky in the Singletary Center. The exhibit closes Sunday at 5 p.m. For more information, go to the museum’s Web site, www.uky.edu/ArtMuseum.

For ideas and more information about things to see and do in Central Kentucky this summer, go to the Lexington Arts Council’s Web site, www.lexarts.com, or the Lexington Convention and Visitors Bureau’s Web site, www.visitlex.com.

Theo Edmonds spent the first 15 years of his adult life chasing traditional success.

From his native Breathitt County, he moved to Lexington and earned an art and theater degree from Transylvania University.

Then he went to New Orleans, where he earned a master’s degree in health care administration and a law degree from Tulane University. He was admitted to the Louisiana Bar and had good jobs in corporate America.

Then, one day, it hit him: “I realized I was doing something that wasn’t making me happy on any level. I knew I needed to be creative. So I called in one morning and quit.”

He returned to Lexington, where he spent much of the past two years in a rented industrial building on Manchester Street writing poetry, painting and creating large mixed-media pieces of art.

Edmonds, 39, is now finding a new kind of success with his art, thanks to talent, hard work and a generous patron. For the past five months, he has been living and working in New York City, where he opens a two-week show Thursday in rented space in Manhattan’s trendy SoHo district.

After the show, Edmonds will move to France and create work for a solo show in September in Deauville, Lexington’s sister city, during its annual American Film Festival. After that, another show of his work is planned in Dublin, Ireland.

Edmonds was having modest success as an artist in Lexington, where he said the contemporary art scene has begun to blossom. “Lexington has immense potential,” he said. “It’s an amazing place; you never know what’s going to happen.”

But living and working in Harlem has been a whole ‘nother world.

“The influence and energy in New York has been incredible,” he said. “My work has fundamentally changed and evolved since I’ve been here. It has become much more varied. I have more confidence in my work. I feel very blessed; I don’t know how else to say it.”

Many of Edmonds’ pieces are a combination of paint and castoff items that tell stories, often Appalachian stories.

“The idea of things having a second life is authentic to me, and very Appalachian,” said Edmonds, whose father, Teddy Edmonds, represents Breathitt, Lee and Estill counties in the General Assembly.

Since moving to New York, Edmonds also has spent a lot of time in art museums. He has studied the work of fellow abstract expressionists such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, and he has developed a new appreciation for the old masters.

“If you don’t know where you came from, you don’t know where you might be able to go,” he said.

Edmonds’ show is built around three themes: Appalachian storytelling pieces he created in Lexington; a series called Gabba Gabba Hey, inspired by New York street culture; and a series called Circus Maximus, which uses circus characters to tell universal human stories.

Edmonds’ work in New York and France is being made possible by patron Martine Head, who comes from a French horse-breeding family and now lives in Lexington.

Head said she met Edmonds last May at a show of his work in Lexington and was impressed. “I think that Theo has got depth,” she said. “He’s a true artist … a profound soul.”

Lexington has always embraced traditional art. Since moving to Lexington, Head has noticed a growing appreciation for contemporary art. Still, many fine local artists receive little recognition.

Head remembered the first time she visited Tuska Studio, which exhibits the work of the late Lexington sculptor John Tuska in his former home near downtown. “I walked into that house and thought, Wow! There is this gem in Lexington and nobody knows it’s here,” she said.

Head thought that living and working in New York and Europe would allow Edmonds to develop his artistic talent and receive more exposure.

While Edmonds has spent most of his time in New York painting, he also has been writing poetry. On April 5, three Kentucky poets flew up and joined him in a performance at the Bowery Poetry Club.

The opening reception for Edmonds’ show in SoHo will have a decidedly Kentucky flavor: Acoustic music, country ham hors d’oeuvres, bourbon and Ale 8 One.

Edmonds said he is proud of his Appalachian roots, and is surprised by how many other proud Kentuckians he has met in New York.

“It’s a city of people like me who have a burning desire to say something through their art,” he said. “But hopes and fears and joys are the same in New York as they are in Breathitt County.”